I miss Lou...god damn he was a good looking animal, probably better he died young, I think of him on deck.We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met? Ive also been thinking about not voting ONE PART OF ME THINKS: If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep me disgusted and bored and cynical and to give me every possible reason to stay at home doing whatever... on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.... 
If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it.Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.
I suppose an active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize the values of creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fullfillment in expieriencing beauty, art or nature. I think there is also purpose in that life that is barren of everything...Austere . Austerity can shed light on mans behavior, my own behavior, namely in my attitudes towards existence, on a fishing vessel an existence very much restricted by external forces. creativity and enjoyment are scarce. If there is a meaning in life then surely there is a meaning to human suffering. In the face of suffering I can applie certain learned principles or I can act how I am feeling ( surely resulting in a fistfight). Here in lies the chance for a man to either make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. Ultimately this is what dostoyevski meant when he spoke about the worthyness of suffering, this, it would seem is a determining factor."It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship."
Some days boil down to the last of human freedomes, tired, sleep deprived, cup o noodles and granola bar for dinner sore everywhere... the last freedome being the choice to choose ones own attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose ones own way! And there are always choices to make, every day, every hour offers the opportunity to make a decision that would determine if you will or will not submit to the circumstances which attempt to rob you of your of inner freedome: which determine whether or not you become the plaything of circumstances, renouncing freedome and dignity to become someone who reacts to the emotions they have about any given set of circumstances. Suffering is underrated in America... fishing provides me with the kind of suffering and provisional existence that seems to feed a part of my soul that goes unfed in the 9 to 5 hours of ordinary existence
It is odd, hours seem like days and yet weeks go by in a flash... A paradox. A 54 year old man was lost in the herring fishery, no one knows what happened, they havent recovered the body yet. My guess: 20 years crewing and he had probably taken 100000 pisses off the aft deck, at some point it got routine and the gravity of the bussiness that he was in didnt seem as tangible and he got sloppy.
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